How could you run baseball then without night ball? You had to have night ball to improve the proceeds, to pay larger salaries, and I went to work, the first year I received $135 a month. I thought that was amazing. I had to put away enough money to go to dental college. I found out it was not better in dentistry. I stayed in baseball.
Any other questions you would like to ask me?
Kefauver: Mr. Stengel, are you prepared to answer particularly why baseball wants this bill passed?
Stengel: Well, I would have to say at the present time, I think that baseball has advanced in this respect for the player help. That is an amazing statement for me to make, because you can retire with an annuity at fifty and what organization in America allows you to retire at fifty and receive money?
Now the second thing about baseball that I think is very interesting to the public or to all of us is that it is the owner’s fault if he does not improve his club, along with the officials in the ball club and the players.
Now what causes that?
If I am going to go on the road and we are a traveling ball club and you know the cost of transportation now—we travel sometimes with three Pullman coaches, the New York Yankees, and I’m just a salaried man and do not own stock in the New York Yankees. I found out that in traveling with the New York Yankees on the road and all, that it is the best, and we have broken records in Washington this year, we have broken them in every city but New York and we have lost two clubs that have gone out of the city of New York.
Of course, we have had some bad weather. I would say that they are mad at us in Chicago, we fill the parks. They have come out to see good material. I will say they are mad at us in Kansas City, but we broke their attendance records.
Now on the road we only get possibly 27 cents. I am not positive of these figures, as I am not an official. If you go back fifteen years or if I owned stock in the club, I would give them to you.
Kefauver: Mr. Stengel, I am not sure that I made my question clear.
Stengel: Yes, sir. Well, that is all right. I am not sure I’m going to answer yours perfectly, either.
Senator Joseph C. O’Mahoney: How many minor leagues were there in baseball when you began?
Stengel: Well, there were not so many at that time because of this fact: anybody to go into baseball at that time with the educational schools that we had were small, while you were probably thoroughly educated at school, you had to be—we had only small cities that you could put a team in and they would go defunct.
Why, I remember the first year I was at Kankakee, Illinois, and a bank offered me $550 if I would let them have a little notice. I left there and took a uniform because they owed me two weeks’ pay. But I either had to quit but I did not have enough money to go to dental college so I had to go with the manager down to Kentucky.
What happened there was if you got by July, that was the big date. You did not play night ball and you did not play Sundays in half of the cities because of a Sunday observance, so in those days when things were tough, and all of it was, I mean to say, why they just closed up July 4 and there you were sitting there in the depot. You could go to work someplace else, but that was it.
So I got out of Kankakee, Illinois, and I just go there for the visit now.
Senator John A. Carroll: The question Senator Kefauver asked you was what, in your honest opinion, with your forty-eight years of experience, is the need for this legislation in view of the fact that baseball has not been subject to antitrust laws.
Stengel: No.
Carroll: I had a conference with one of the attorneys representing not only baseball but all of the sports, and I listened to your explanation to Senator Kefauver. It seemed to me it had some clarity. I asked the attorney this question: What was the need for this legislation? I wonder if you would accept his definition. He said they didn’t want to be subjected to the ipse dixit of the federal government because they would throw a lot of damage suits on the ad damnum clause. He said, in the first place, the Toolson case was sui generis, it was de minimus non curat lex.
Stengel: Well, you are going to get me there for about two hours.
Kefauver: Thank you, very much, Mr. Stengel. We appreciate your presence here.
Mr. Mickey Mantle, will you come around?
Mr. Mantle, do you have any observations with reference to the applicability of the antitrust laws to baseball?
Mantle: My views are just about the same as Casey’s.
DIZZY DEAN’S DAY
ST. LOUIS, 1934
Through the murk of cigarette smoke and liniment fumes in the Cardinals’ clubhouse a radio announcer babbled into a microphone.
“And now,” he read with fine spontaneity from a typewritten sheet prepared hours in advance, “and now let’s have a word from the Man of the Hour, Manager Frank Frisch.”
The Man of the Hour shuffled forward. He had started changing clothes. His shirttail hung limply over bare thighs. The Man of the Hour’s pants had slipped down and they dragged about his ankles. You could have planted petunias in the loam on his face. The Man of the Hour looked as though he had spent his hour in somebody’s coal mine.
Beside him, already scrubbed and combed and natty in civilian clothes, awaiting his turn to confide to a nationwide audience that “the Cardinals are the greatest team I ever played with and I sure am glad we won the champeenship today and I sure hope we can win the World Series from Detroit,” stood Dizzy Dean, destiny’s child.
There was a conscious air of grandeur about the man. He seemed perfectly aware of and not at all surprised at the fact that just outside the clubhouse five thousand persons were pressing against police lines, waiting to catch a glimpse of him, perhaps even to touch the hem of his garment.
He couldn’t have known that in that crowd one woman was weeping into the silver fox fur collar of her black cloth coat, sobbing, “I’m so happy! I can’t stand it!” She was Mrs. Dizzy Dean.
All afternoon Dizzy Dean had seemed surrounded by an aura of greatness. A crowd of 37,402 persons jammed Sportsman’s Park to see the game that would decide the National League pennant race. To this reporter it did not appear that they had come to see the Cardinals win the championship. Rather, they were there to see Dizzy come to glory.
It was Dean’s ball game. He, more than anyone else, had kept the Cardinals in the pennant race throughout the summer. He had won two games in the last five days to help bring the Red Birds to the top of the league. Here, with the championship apparently hinging upon the outcome of this game, was his chance to add the brightest jewel to his crown, and at the same time to achieve the personal triumph of becoming the first National League pitcher since 1917 to win 30 games in a season.
And it was Dizzy’s crowd. Although the game was a box office “natural,” it is doubtful that, had it not been announced that Dean would pitch, fans would have been thronged before the Dodier street gate when the doors were opened at 9:30 A.M. They were, and from then until game time they came in increasing numbers. Eventually, some had to be turned away from lack of space.
Packed in the aisles, standing on the ramps and clinging to the grandstand girders, the fans followed Dizzy with their eyes, cheered his every move.
They whooped when he rubbed resin on his hands. They yowled when he fired a strike past a batter. They stood and yelled when he lounged to the plate, trailing his bat in the dust. And when, in the seventh inning, with the game already won by eight runs, he hit a meaningless single, the roar that thundered from the stands was as though he had accomplished the twelve labors of Hercules.
The fact was, the fans were hungry for drama, and that was the one ingredient lacking. With such a stage setting as that crowd provided, with such a buildup as the National League race, with such a hero as Dizzy, Mr. Cecil B. DeMille would have ordered things better.
He would have had the New York Giants beat Brooklyn and thus make a victory essential to the Cards’ pennant prospects. He would have had Cincinnati leading St. Louis until the
eighth inning, when a rally would have put the Red Birds one run ahead. Then Mr. DeMille would have sent ex-St. Louis Hero Jim Bottomley, now one of the enemy, to bat against Hero Dean, with Cincinnati runners on every base. And he would have had Dizzy pour across three blinding strikes to win the ball game.
In the real game there was no suspense. Cincinnati tried, but the Cards couldn’t be stopped. They just up and won the game, 9-0, and the pennant, and to blazes with drama.
Still, drama is where you find it. The crowd seemed to find it in the gawky frame of Mr. Dean, and in the figures on the scoreboard which showed Brooklyn slowly overhauling the Giants in their game in the east.
Dean was warming up in front of the Cardinal dugout when the first-inning score of the New York-Brooklyn game was posted, showing four runs for the Giants and none for the Dodgers. As an apprehensive “Ooooon!” from the fans greeted the score, Dizzy glanced toward the scoreboard. Watching through field glasses, this reporter saw his eyes narrow slightly. That was all. A moment later he strolled to the plate, entirely at ease, to accept a diamond ring donated by his admirers.
Then the game started, and for a few minutes the customers’ attention was diverted from their hero by the exploits of some of his mates.
In the first inning Ernie Orsatti, chasing a low drive to right center by Mark Koenig, raced far to his left, dived forward, somersaulted, and came up with the ball. To everyone except the fans in the right field seats it seemed a miraculous catch. The spectators closest to the play were sure they saw Orsatti drop the ball and recover it while his back was toward the plate. But everyone screamed approbation.
Magnificent plays, one after another, whipped the stands into a turmoil of pleasure. In Cincinnati’s second inning, after Bottomley had singled, Leo Durocher scooted far to his right to nail a grounder by Pool and, in one astonishingly swift motion, he pivoted and whipped the ball to Frisch for a forceout of Bottomley.
Again in the fourth inning, there was a play that brought the fans whooping to their feet. This time Frisch scooped up a bounder from Pool’s bat and beat Koenig to second base, Durocher hurdling Frisch’s prostrate body in order to avoid ruining the play. A few minutes earlier Frisch had brought gasps and cheers from the stands by stretching an ordinary single into a two-base hit, reaching second only by the grace of a breakneck headfirst slide.
Play by play, inning by inning, the crowd was growing noisier, more jubilant. Cheer followed exultant cheer on almost every play.
Meanwhile the Cards were piling up a lead. Meanwhile, too, Brooklyn was chiseling runs off New York’s lead, and the scoreboard became a magnet for all eyes. When Brooklyn scored two runs in the eighth inning to tie the Giants, Announcer Kelly didn’t wait for the scoreboard to flash the news. He shouted it through his megaphone, and as fans in each succeeding section of seats heard his words, waves of applause echoed through the stands.
Shadows were stretching across the field when Cincinnati came to bat in the ninth inning. The National League season was within minutes of its end. The scoreboard long since had registered the final tallies for all other games. Only the tied battle in New York and the contest on this field remained unfinished.
Dean lounged to the pitching mound. The man was completing his third game in six days. He was within three putouts of his second shutout in those six days. He didn’t seem tired. He hardly seemed interested. He was magnificently in his element, completely at ease in the knowledge that every eye was on him.
The first two Cincinnati batters made hits. Dizzy was pitching to Adam Comorosky when a wild yell from the stands caused him to glance at the scoreboard. The Dodgers had scored three runs in the tenth. New York’s score for the inning had not been posted.
Seen through field glasses, Dean’s face was expressionless. He walked Comorosky. The bases were filled with no one out. Was Dizzy tiring, or was he deliberately setting the stage for the perfect melodramatic finish?
The scoreboard boy hung up a zero for the Giants. The pennant belonged to the Cardinals. Most pitchers would have said, “the hell with it,” and taken the course of least resistance, leaving it to the fielders to make the putouts.
But this was Dean’s ball game. Seen through a haze of fluttering paper, cushions and torn scorecards, he seemed to grow taller. He fanned Clyde Manion. A low roar rumbled through the stands. The fans saw what was coming. Dizzy was going to handle the last three batters himself.
Methodically, unhurriedly, he rifled three blinding strikes past Pinch-Hitter Petoskey. Was that a faint grin on Dizzy’s face? The roar from the stands had become rolling thunder. The outfielders foresaw what was coming. They started in from their positions as Dizzy began pitching to Sparky Adams.
They were almost on the field when Adams, in hopeless desperation, swung at a pitch too fast for him to judge. His bat just tipped the ball, sending it straight upward in a wobbly, puny foul fly to DeLancey.
Dean didn’t laugh. He didn’t shout or caper. The man who has been at times a gross clown was in this greatest moment a figure of quiet dignity. Surrounded by his players he walked slowly to the dugout, a mad, exultant thunder drumming in his ears.
LOATHSOME PLOY: THE D.H.
1980
The outlook wasn’t brilliant for the Mudville ten that day; The score stood four to two with but one inning more to play . . .
Chances are Ernest L. Thayer, who created the mighty Casey, and DeWolf Hopper, whose recitations immortalized him, have got beyond the stage of whirling in their graves. The game they knew as baseball, the nine-man game, is played only in the National League and Japan’s Central League today, and it came perilously close to eradication from the National League the other day. By the narrowest of margins, the league voted against adopting the loathsome designated hitter rule in slavish imitation of the American League.
As Bill Lee, the thinking man’s pitcher, pointed out several years ago, the designated hitter serves one useful purpose. It relieves the manager of all responsibility except to post the lineup card on the dugout wall and make sure everybody gets to the airport on time.
Once there was a theory that devising strategy, dictating and altering tactics, matching wits with the licensed genius across the way were part of the manager’s job and that his degree of success in these areas accounted for his ranking in his profession. In the ten-man game, most decisions are made for the manager automatically. If he wants to phone his bookmaker in the third inning, there is seldom anything else demanding his attention.
The only excuse anybody gives for adopting the d.h. rule is that baseball is in a rut and cries aloud for some change, any change. The fact is, baseball has had longer to test and polish its rules than any other team game in the country, and this process of evolution has produced a code that seldom demands change because it is beautiful in its fairness and balance. If you don’t know a rule governing a certain situation, give it some thought; when you have arrived at a decision that is fair to both sides, you will have the rule as it is written.
Tested, altered and adjusted over a century, the rules for nine-man baseball became a triumph of checks and balances. There are moves the manager can make in the interest of offense, but he must pay for them. When to remove the pitcher used to be, and in the National League still is, one of the major decisions up to a manager. Suppose the pitcher allowed a run in the first inning and none since. It is now the eighth inning, it is his turn to bat, and the team is still trailing, 1-0. The pitcher is strong enough to work at least a couple more innings but he can’t win without a run and he isn’t likely to contribute much to the offense.
If you take him out for a pinch-batter, you lose his services and must rely on the bull pen, and that’s the way it should be. This charming balance is a major factor in the attraction of the game.
With the corruption called designated hitter, the balance is destroyed, the challenge to the manager eliminated. He pinch-hits for the pitcher every time around, and it costs him nothing. National League managers have
to think; American Leaguers don’t, and maybe that helps explain the result of the annual All-Star Game.
A designated hitter has added a few points to the team batting average and presumably added a few runs to the season’s score. The men who own baseball have long had the notion that more hitting and scoring produces more business, but there is no proof of that. The d.h. rule is in its eighth year now, and as yet nobody has been overheard saying, “Let’s go out and watch the designated hitter.”
By the winter of 1972 the governing intellects in the American League were in a panic. For more than a decade A.L. attendance had run substantially behind business in the National League. One year the N.L. had drawn 17,324,857, a tidy 5,456,297 more than the American.
“So what can we do about it?” the Americans asked one another.
“My cook says the public wants more hitting and scoring,” one replied.
“Well,” said another, “suppose we pinch-hit for the pitcher every time up but let the pitcher stay in the game. Think that might add some pizzazz?”
“Can’t hurt to try,” said still another. “Sure, it changes the whole game but who cares? Alexander Cartwright is dead.”
So it came about, and the changes were immediately reflected at the box office. That is, the American League and its ten-man game continued to run behind the National League every year, millions behind, until 1977, when it added franchises in Seattle and Toronto, expanding to fourteen clubs while the Nationals remained at twelve.
Then A.L. figures inched up, edging past the other league for the first time in many years. In the American League press guide, the 1979 attendance of 22,371,979 is marked with two asterisks denoting “major league and professional sports league record.” Broken down on a team-by-team basis, the American League average was 1,597,-999 and the Nationals? 1,764,468. And still those chumps almost went for the d.h.
TED WILLIAMS SPITS
1958
By now some modern Dickens, probably in Boston, must surely have brought out a best seller entitled Great Expectorations. It was a $4,998 mistake when Ted Williams chose puritanical and antiseptic New England for his celebrated exhibition of spitting for height and distance. In easygoing New York’s insanitary subway the price is only $2.
The Red Smith Reader Page 18